The San Diego based NWEAMO Festival will host its 19th annual international festival of evolving music and arts related creations over four days, one performance per day, each one unique. The festival will feature a combined effort of 30 composers and performers, many of whom who will be traveling to San Diego from diverse corners of the world. The work that they present will be equally diverse. That is the aesthetic mission of NWEAMO (New West Evolving Arts and Music Organization).

Concert #1: The festival opens Thursday, March 16 with a 7 PM solo recital by NYC based pianist Geoffrey Burleson in Smith Recital Hall at SDSU School of Music. Mr. Burleson, who heads the piano departments at Princeton University and Hunter College, is a globe-trotting, diverse artist who maintains a dizzying performance schedule, both in repertoire and location. Burleson will perform a program blending contemporary masterpieces, including Frank Zappa’s tour d’force “Beebop Tango”, arranged by Burleson. Burleson will start his program with the West Coast premiere of a lost masterpiece by romantic French composer Camille Saint-Saëns, which he discovered last year while digging through archives of the Paris library. Burleson is the premier interpreter of Saint-Saëns, and has been recording the complete virtuosic, voluminous Saint-Saëns piano catalog in a series of CDs for Naxos.

Concert #2: Next, on Friday, March 17, 7 PM, will feature four world premieres from “St. Francis De Los Barrios”, an indie-classical, trans-genre rock opera based on St. Francis of Assisi, set in the present day Tijuana red light district Zona Norte among trans-gender HIV afflicted sex workers living in danger and poverty.

Inventively fabulistic and magical, librettist Allan Havis has created in his Francis a charismatic, bi-sexual Saint for a new age. Androgynous, world-weary and himself HIV infected, Francis has started working miracles, curing HIV for others and healing bullet wounds without medicine. The silhouette of the Virgin Mary on deserted streets follows Francis from abandoned buildings and vacant city lots. Pope Francis is coming to Tijuana to meet and comprehend this holy, street savvy derelict with the same name who is a attracting international attention over night. People are storming the Mexican border wall to touch him and seek cures. The corrupt TJ chief of police wants Francis murdered. There’s a terrible price on his head.

The music, by NWEAMO artistic director Joseph Martin Waters, ranges from gentle, bossa nova ballads, a 6 part profane motet performed by a Doo-wop – Beach Boys infused a cappella street choir, to metal infused tango-from-hell with wobble-bass electronics. It will be performed by SWARMIUS, the San Diego and New York City-based virtuoso Indie-Classical Ensemble, augmented by a large ensemble of singers and instrumentalists.

Another feature on the program will be the West Coast premiere of “Resist”, for big band, a cathartic response to the new regime in Washington.

Rounding out the program will be recent acoustic and electronics infused works from SWARMIUS’ touring repertoire.

Concert #3: Saturday, March 18, 7 PM will feature a diverse, juried selection of international composers with works employing invented instruments, electronics, dance and video. Please see below for details & links.

Concert #4: Sunday, March 19, 2 PM. TrioPolis, an acoustic trio in residence at the University of North Texas,
completes the festival with classic & recently commissioned works for violin, clarinet and piano.